Moscow conference discusses Trotsky's key work
Betrayal remembered
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* Russia Scholars and activists gathered in Moscow on 22-24 November to mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky The conference program consisted of more than 31 presentations, half by Russians. While most speakers agreed with Trotsky's general analysis, there were disagreements over aspects of it. Several speakers, including conference co-organiser Alexei Gusev, felt that the Soviet system was state capitalist. Other Russian participants argued that Trotsky knew that capitalism could no more be restored in the Soviet Union than feudalism could be restored in France but that Trotsky held out the threat of capitalist restoration as a means of mobilising a fighting spirit among militants for the necessary battles against the Stalinist blight. Some argued that the isolation of the Soviet economy from the world market during the Stalin period was a necessary stage.
Boris Slavin, in his report, "Trotsky on the Material Prerequisites and Criteria for Socialism," argued that the market reforms of the period of the New Economic Policy, when the Soviet government allowed certain market mechanisms to take effect, should have been continued but with more state controls. It was the Stalin repression, Slavin maintained, that not only suppressed discussion, research and initiative, but led to the isolation of Soviet society from technological advances abroad. "We slept while the West developed the technological revolution," he said. All this led to the current breakdown: Soviet society, on its own, starting from such backwardness, could not catch up with and overtake the capitalist systems in labour productivity.
Slavin concluded, however, that Marx,
Lenin, and Trotsky were wrong in relying on the world revolution. "What world revolution?" Slavin asked. Instead, he insisted, the working class in any particular country should not overthrow capitalism until its level of labour productivity has exceeded that of the rest of the world, thereby giving it the capacity to isolate itself from the pressures of the world market and go it alone. In that way, socialism can be built in one country.
Mikhail Voyeikov, Professor of Economics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, disagreed. The most technologically advanced capitalist countries, he pointed out, depend totally on innumerable international economic links, and thus even such a technologically advanced society could not survive on its own. On the other hand, any society that could possibly survive on its own in our epoch - if one could be found today would have to be one with a very primitive level of technology, such as that of the peoples of the remote rain forests. Thus, neither of Slavin's preconditions for socialism in one country are conceivable; the
Analysis with Attitude revolution is by nature international.
Slavin was also challenged by Nikolai
Korolyev, former editor of the Moscow publishing house Science, which in 1990
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published Trotsky's The Stalin School of Falsification. "The world revolution did not happen?," Korolyev asked Slavin. "The world revolution began in October 1917 and has continued and will continue until the full victory of the world socialist revolution in the entire world... "Revolution is not a primitive one-moment act, that either happened or didn't. World socialist revolution, as Lenin and Trotsky (and Marx and Engels before them) understood, is an epoch that consists of a series of revolutionary advances and counterrevolutionary setbacks... "World socialist revolution consists of all currents of the revolutionary movement everywhere -working-class, peasantry, the national liber-
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A word from the organizers... A longer report by Marilyn Vogt-Downey, a New York representative of the International Committee for the Study of Trotsky's Legacy, which sponsored the conference, is available at the address below. The Committee's next conference. "Trotsky and the Russian Revolution" will be held in Moscow on October 10-12 1997. The Committee recently published a Russian-language collection of papers from its first conference in 1994. Work has begun on a Russian edition of The Case of Leon Trotsky, the minutes of the Dewey Commission. Contacts Russian Federation: 117218 Moscow. Ul. Krasikova, 27, Russian Academy of Sciences, Room 620, Professor M.I. Voyeikov; © (w) 095 332-4525; (h) 095 326-3497 USA: P.O. Box 1890, New York, NY 10009; 0 +1 718636-5446; e-mail: mvogt@igc.apc.org Britain: Terry Brotherstone (© +44 01224 272466; fax 272203; e-mail <t.brotherstone@abdn.ac.uk>
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